Lawmakers Seek Lower Limit For Drunken-driving Charges

January 28, 1997|By ALAN LEVIN; Courant Staff Writer

In what highway safety advocates call their top priority of this year's legislative session, lawmakers Monday proposed legislation that would lower the legal limit for drunken driving from a blood-alcohol level of 0.10 percent to 0.08 percent.

The bill's backers argue that the lower limit better reflects the point at which people's driving becomes impaired after drinking, but would still not affect light, social drinkers.

Lowering the legal limit would save lives, said the bill's sponsor, Sen. Edith G. Prague, D-Columbia. Prague said that 25 of the state's 155 alcohol-related fatalities in 1995 were caused by drivers whose blood-alcohol level registered between 0.08 percent and 0.10 percent.

``The human suffering as a result of these accidents is beyond one's imagination,'' Prague said in testimony before the legislature's transportation committee.

The bill is being pushed by Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. The latter group says 13 states have set the driving limit at 0.08 percent, which equals eight- hundredths of a percent of alcohol in the blood.

Under current Connecticut law, persons driving with a blood-alcohol level of 0.10 percent are presumed to be legally drunk. First- time offenders are subject to a one-year license suspension, up to a $1,000 fine and community service. Typically, however, first offenders can apply for an alcohol education program, which, if completed, erases the drunken-driving conviction from their record.

If a driver has a blood-alcohol level of 0.07 percent to 0.10 percent, he or she can be charged with being ``impaired,'' an infraction that is handled like a traffic ticket.

The proposed change would subject all drivers with 0.08 percent or above to the state's drunken-driving penalties.

No one spoke against the bill at Monday's hearing, and several lobbyists for businesses that sell alcoholic beverages said they would not oppose the legislation.

But some in those industries -- including liquor manufacturers and distributors and restaurant and bar owners -- are uneasy about what they perceive as a growing list of laws that restrict alcohol use. As a result, they are eyeing Prague's bill cautiously.

Marshall Collins, a lobbyist for the Connecticut Restaurant Association, said his group did not oppose the proposal and had worked actively in behalf of several anti-drunken driving initiatives.

``We're not going to go in there and try to kill it,'' Collins said. ``We are going to watch it to make sure it doesn't go to [a blood-alcohol limit of] 0.06 or 0.05.''

Prague, who helped spearhead several of the state's tougher drunken-driving bills in the 1980s, told the committee that fatalities related to alcohol had begun creeping up after many years of decline. About 17,000 people died nationwide last year in drunken-driving crashes.